Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today, Helen Thompson and I are joined by the historian Tom Holland, historian of the ancient world and we're going to talk about power, corruption, morality, decay, then and maybe now.

Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. As politics speeds up, slow down with a subscription to the LRB where Brexit and Trump are only part of a picture that includes, well, everything else.

Read relevant pieces and subscribe at a special rate at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking.

I went to see that Robert Harris trilogy, the two that they did in the West End about Cicero, Tom and you wrote the piece in the program, drawing the comparisons then and now.

The audience, I mean everyone is kind of like just completely taken on board but thought that this must have been a story, the story of Cicero, the story of the end of the Republic, must have lessons for us and maybe it does.

And yet there's also I think a feeling when you look at it that there's never been probably a period in the history of modern democracies or the history of the American Republic where people don't wander.

Are we further back?

Or further back. Are we living through, I mean it's just the kind of story that everyone goes to all the time when they think they need a template for the end of things.

Is it just the story that dominates all the others, the one that we can't get away from?

I think it's because of the distinctive relationship that the West and what previously been called the Latin West has with ancient Rome.

The fact that this empire existed, that it was so immense that it stretched from Scotland to the Persian Gulf and now it's utterly gone, haunts the imagination.

But if you think of an oak and when an oak dies it continues to sustain ecosystems, the kind of the mulch of the trunk and the roots continues to feed creatures.

And Rome has similarly has provided a kind of civilizational mulch. So it's sustained Islamic civilization, even though Islam defined itself as being in opposition to Rome.

But you think of the baths or more secondly, the idea of a kind of universalist, God-guided empire, that's clearly a Roman idea that has fed into Islam.

Of course there's the civilization of the second Rome, Constantinople, and although we call the people who lived in that, Byzantines, they call themselves Romans, they were Rameoi.

But for both Muslims and for the Byzantines, the Rome that they look back to was the Rome of the Christian empire, it was the Rome of Constantine and Justinian.

What's distinctive about the Latin West is that although Constantine was a hugely significant figure, particularly in the Middle Ages,

we have always looked back beyond that to the pagan empire, to the Antenine Peace, to Augustus, to Julius Caesar, right the way back through the Republic, to Romulus and Remus, and then ultimately to Enneus.

And there has never been a moment, probably since it was written that the Enneed has not been read in what was the lands of the Western Empire.

And so for that reason, Rome for us in the West has the quality almost of a kind of great work of science fiction, that it is both simultaneously very familiar and very strange,

and the familiarity amplifies the strangeness and vice versa.

And I think that that is why, no matter what your politics, no matter what your assumptions, you can always look into the mirror of Rome and find something that reflects or distorts where you are at the present.

...